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Why can't coinbase follow Stripe's example of having a "publishable key" for payment forms? If it weren't for the headache of needing to make an API call to create a payment page (or button, or iframe), I would have added Coinbase support to Tarsnap months ago.

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Something else that's a bit different is that you have to create an invoice/order number to send along to Coinbase, then mark that invoice as paid later. With Braintree/Stripe, the server makes a call to the service with the amount to charge and it gets back a success or fail which I can then immediately display to the user showing that the purchase went through.

With Coinbase I haven't found a way to have that tightly integrated experience.

Probably because a bitcoin transaction doesn't confirm instantly? (a block is found once every 10 minutes on average).

Exactly. Which means developing a completely separate process for accepting bitcoins over credit cards. I worked on adding Coinbase to my small website a while back but the workflow of how it works is so different, I would have had to write a whole new sales process just for bitcoin.

It seems to me that the process for Coinbase could be exactly the same as the process for Paypal -- post a form with the amount to be paid and the account money should be paid to, and get a payment notification later.

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